Czech Farmers Beg Workers to Hop to It

The Czechoslovak hops crop, an ingredient for its famous Pilsener beer, is in peril, and farmers are seeking soldiers, unemployed laborers and Polish guest workers to tend the crop.

The growing season entered a key stage in Czechoslovakia’s Rakovnik hops region last week, when young hops vines must be carefully hand-tied to long strings dropped from the complicated hops racks that dot the West Bohemian countryside like so many washing lines.

Any disruption in the hops crop is serious business in Czechoslovakia, where per capita beer consumption is more than 100 quarts per year, and premium beers such as Pilsener Urquell and the original Budweiser (called Budvar here) lead the country’s drive for hard-currency exports.

Farmers say they need 110,000 workers to help with the hops crop in the next two weeks, but they are still more than 20,000 workers short.

“Hops Farmers’ SOS Goes Unanswered,” ran the headline on the Prague newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes recently as the paper launched its own call for workers to help string up the hops.

Appeals to unemployment offices in West Bohemia have met a dismal response. In one employment office, of 500 registered unemployed, only one man signed a contract to work on a hops farm.

Still, farmers hope that some of the Czech republic’s 90,000 unemployed will take up the offer.

“Unfortunately, the farms are not going to pay much more than the unemployment benefits, so there are not a lot of people who want to do this kind of manual work,” said one employment agency official.

The Czechoslovak Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has arranged several thousand temporary work permits for Polish guest workers, Mlada Fronta reported, and urgent negotiations are under way with the Defense Ministry to draft soldiers to help with the crop.

Under Czechoslovakia’s Communist rulers, secondary schools and some universities were closed during hops season, and students were sent into the fields from dawn to dusk to earn between $10 and $20 a week.

But pro-democracy reformers have banned the practice, saying it unfairly exploits the students and distracts them from their studies.

Officials at the famous Budvar brewery in Ceske Budejovice, makers of Czechoslovakia’s original Budweiser beer, say they do not expect to be affected by any shortfall in the hops harvest.

“We are the best brewery in Czechoslovakia, so we are always at the head of the hops supply line. It is the smaller brewers who will suffer, “ company spokesman Rudolf Jirasko said.

Despite the official ban on student labor, some farms are finding that they have nowhere else to turn. Cooperative farms are offering to raise hops workers’ wages by more than 50%, and even contribute money to local schools if they will let students work on the farms.

The Kolesovice cooperative farm in the heart of Bohemia hops country said it had reached an agreement with a local school to let students study in the mornings and spend the afternoons working in the fields.

“But the Ministry of Education told us we were risking a jail term if we tried to hire the students,” said Miloslav Manek, the farm’s agronomist.

Czech hops are renowned for their bittersweet flavor, taken from the region’s red clay soil. They earn the country valuable hard currency. Seventy-five percent of the 13,000-ton annual harvest is exported, primarily to the United States, Japan and other Central European countries.